End of the year musings, avec champagne

Today I did a whole lotta nothing. Or really, a whole lotta baby-watching because these days I'm a weekend landscaping widow. I've mentioned here before that Husband and I have had this landscaper working in our backyard for the past week or two, and he's worked miracles on the boggy quagmire that would appear behind our house whenever a bit of rain would fall. It's now a boggy quagmire retained by a beautiful stone wall with a completely bog-less gravel path running in front of it. But seriously. We're hopeful that even the confined bog will go away once the hundreds of feet of drainage pipes Husband has been spending every.spare.weekend.hour laying are all in place. Then he gets a turn as a landscape widower once it's warm enough here for me to justify spending hours at a time planting things in these new planting beds we have all of a sudden.

In the meantime, I'm starting to think of what to get Husband for his 37th birthday coming up in a few weeks. I think I'll look into renting a room in a b&b in Asheville, or perhaps a rustic cabin or some such. Husband has a good friend living up there now and we could perhaps get him and his charming wife to go out to lunch with us while we're up there. (And if said friend is reading this, he should be sure and comment on this post, leaving me his email address which will be hidden from others. I do not have his email address and would like to hear from him whether he'll actually be around some mid-January weekend...!)

Anyways. My dear husband has just put a second bottle of champagne left behind by some mysterious but much-beloved guest at our cocktail party into the freezer for a rapid chill. We've just polished off the first bottle, see. Now off I go to curl up with him to get drunkish and watch Battlestar Galactica which is, as far as I'm concerned, the perfect way for us to ring in 2007.

Happy new year, y'all!

A little punchy here...

My to-do list was ridiculously huge today, even for me. I've just begun to realize how close Thanksgiving is and how much I want to do before Husband's brother and nephew get here from Colorado and my mom and rest of the clan show up. The number one thing on my list is to clean the whole house, followed by a trip to the ABC store for booze, getting new plants for the front porch to replace the faded mums, sorting through the morass of papers on our desk, and much, much more. It's a colossal list.

We're hosting this year and I'm so psyched.

I'd like to go officially on record as saying that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. There. Christmas is a definite number two if you ask me. To me, Thanksgiving has all the good parts of Christmas without all the stress and overspending. Most of you who've been reading here awhile already know how much I love to cook and bake and eat and drink. I do! Absolutely love it all! Thanksgiving prominently features ALL FOUR OF THESE FABULOUS THINGS. I also enjoy dinner parties with children running around wildly in the yard while the adults gaze on them fondly over post-dinner glasses of something. Furthermore, I love having an excuse to bust out the china and ancient crystal wine glasses, the white linen napkins, and a freshly ironed tablecloth. See? Thanksgiving is just the best, hands down, for a little Laura Ingalls wannabe like myself.

It's a lot of work to prepare, of course, though the amount of fuss you want to put yourself through is totally optional and therefore shouldn't be stressful if you're careful to maintain perspective. Today's naptime, for example, found me on the back porch trying with little success to empty the contents of a huge, neon-green, supposedly indoor-outdoor, but nevertheless undeniably moldy beanbag in order to save some of the styrofoam beads inside and reduce my paroxysms of liberal guilt over THAT much styrofoam in the landfill from ME. (I can use these styrofoam beads for something...) I was doing this in order to make the porch look nicer without this enormous, moldy, styrofoam-leaking eyesore--for Thanksgiving. I even went so far as to floss the porch floorboards free of the stuck styrofoam beads with a pick-up-stick, vacuuming it all up with Husband's handy shop vac. For Thanksgiving. And all the while I was near hysteria--I mean the good kind of cackling, laughing hysteria--over my own stupidity and ingenuity at creating tasks to take up the time here at home. I was thinking to myself, "C'mon, I know being a stay-at-home mom is supposed to be work and all--or at least you're supposed to SAY SO in order to be p.c. these days--but truly, I am making this shit up most of the time!"

Anyways, Husband's out of town for the night, gone to Georgia where he's picking up some furniture in storage at his uncle's house. It's for Thanksgiving, you know, to make our still-empty guest room sleepable for Husband's brother. And I'm off to have a second cocktail since it's the weekend. I'm going to try out a recipe for a bishop (American style, not English). If I like it, we might be having them for Thanksgiving.